In recent years, this practice has evolved into sending constituents email messages from House members’ and senators’ official email accounts. The rules still apply: Members of Congress who want to send campaign material or partisan political messages must do so from their campaign accounts or personal accounts, not email addresses ending in “@house.gov” or “@senate.gov.”
In 2009, I began collecting all of the official messages as a part of dissertation work, with the hopes of creating an archive for researchers to use and to answer my own questions about how legislators would “look” ideologically if all we had to go on were the votes they decided to communicate to constituents. At that time, I had to manually enter my email address into the website of every member of Congress. Now it’s easier to keep up, because I just sign up for new members’ lists after every election.
For years, I’ve shared various insights, analyzing word usage, trends in geographical terms and finer bits of information such as how many members of Congress talked about COVID-19 on a given day during the pandemic.
From this work, I have developed a few major insights into how members of Congress use this free perk, offering a better understanding of contemporary political communication tactics. Here are four important points I’ve learned.